Global Cheating

April 18, 2010

I guess I’m stupid. During nine years attending colleges and universities, I wrote all my work. I was too cheap to pay anyone.

My BA degree is in journalism and when I read, “Rampant cheating hurts China’s research ambitions” (Yahoo news), I was disappointed at the lack of balance. There was no mention that cheating is a problem globally—not just in China.

Is this another example of China bashing?

I taught journalism and was an advisor for an award winning high-school newspaper for several years, and the student reporters learned to write balanced pieces even for the opinion page. Both sides of an issue should be heard even if the balance isn’t perfect.

Exams

Since Yahoo’s headquarters are in Sunnyvale, California, I’m going to focus on cheating in America to correct this imbalance.

ABC News/Primetime published “A Crisis in America’s Schools — How It’s Done and Why It’s Happening“.  “…according to a 2002 confidential survey of 12,000 high school students, 74 percent admitted cheating on an examination at least once in the past year…. Lifting papers off the Internet is one of the newer trends in plagiarism — and technology is giving students even more ways to cheat nowadays.”

Then there’s “High-Tech Cheating in College” about cheating at MIT, California Polytechnic State University at San Louis Obispo, and Stanford University. “Many colleges offer no comprehensive approach to minor academic cheating (the exceptions are institutions with honor codes, though few have them according Tracy Mitrano, Cornell University’s director of information-technology policy.”

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.

If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.

5 Comments | America, China, education, media, politics | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Yin Yang

April 11, 2010

Yin Yang is about balance.

In many ethical systems, the right path is the one that does not stray far from the middle. Aristotle preached that virtue was striking a balance between the vices of excess and of defect. A similar concept was presented by Plato, who was influenced by Pythagorean (570 -495 BC) ideas.

The concept of  balance is also an important aspect of  Confucianism since the philosophy of Yin Yang appeared about the same time as Confucius (551 – 479 BC), who wrote of a harmonious life that avoids excesses and deficiencies where wisdom was learned from both the old and the young, the high and the low.

Since Lao Tzu (the founder of Taoism and the concept of Yin and Yang) and Confucius lived about the same time, they may have met and shared thoughts.

The Doctrine of the Mean was a basis for civil service examinations in China from 1312 to 1905.

Confucius

The concept of Yin and Yang applies to many issues of life. In Taoism heaven is masculine and earth is feminine suggesting the dependence of the entire creation upon the Creator.

A whole series of possible interactions between the Yin and Yang in life is contained in the Chinese Book of Changes, the i Ching.

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.

If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar 

2 Comments | China, Chinese Culture, Chinese history, Confucianism | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse